Vital Farms set out to grow brand awareness and deepen affinity among outdoor-oriented consumers who value wellness, sustainability, and starting their days with intention. The goal was to meet these audiences where their daily habits already align with Vital Farms’ ethos—on the trails, outside, and seeking moments of simplicity and joy.
To accomplish this, AllGear Digital and the outdoor exploration platform AllTrails joined with Vital Farms to develop a CPG-category-first custom content activation: the “Sunny Side Up” trail collection on AllTrails, designed to help users “start their day with sunshine and fresh air.”
The campaign aimed to deliver a full-funnel experience across the channels outdoor-oriented consumers engage with most by:
• Inspiring exploration through custom editorial and a co-branded trail list.
• Driving scalable reach through AllGear’s run-of-network media and AllTrails’ high-impact placements.
• Sparking engagement and visibility through paid and organic social amplification.
• Converting interest into action via e-newsletter inclusions and guided on-platform experiences.
• Quantifying impact through a statistically grounded brand lift study across priority audiences.
Ultimately, the campaign set out to prove that when purpose-driven storytelling is carried consistently across platforms, it can spark emotional resonance, drive real-world exploration, and deliver measurable brand lift at scale.
The “Sunny Side Up” campaign brought Vital Farms’ values of transparency, simplicity, and joyful living into the daily routines of outdoor enthusiasts through an integrated content and media experience built across AGD+, AllGear Digital's extended advertising network.
The campaign began with a category-first activation: Vital Farms became the first CPG brand to launch a custom trail collection within the AllTrails ecosystem. With 90M+ members, AllTrails is the world’s most popular and trusted platform for outdoor exploration, connecting people to the outdoors all over the world. This 20-trail list—featuring hand-picked, mood-boosting hikes curated by AllTrails’ trail experts—served as the creative foundation for the entire program and provided a natural, values-led environment for introducing the brand.
From there, the team built a coordinated multi-channel rollout that connected storytelling, media, and measurement. A co-branded landing page on AllTrails gave users a central destination for deeper exploration, while the campaign expanded across a full mix of paid and organic channels. Each channel played a distinct, intentional role:
• Trail list + editorial grounded the campaign in authentic outdoor storytelling.
• High-impact and run-of-network media delivered scale and visibility.
• Paid social served as a high-efficiency engagement engine.
• Newsletters converted interest into meaningful on-platform actions.
• Organic social provided upper-funnel reinforcement and brand context.
One of the campaign’s most meaningful challenges was crafting a creative approach that honored both brands while resonating authentically with outdoor enthusiasts. Vital Farms is an adjacent—not endemic—category within the outdoor space, which meant the storytelling, tone, and imagery needed to feel native to the AllTrails platform and credible to its highly engaged community. The team worked closely across Vital Farms, AllTrails, and AllGear Digital to shape a narrative and visual system that balanced Vital Farms’ warm, purpose-driven personality with the practical, trail-forward expectations of the AllTrails audience. This alignment ensured the “Sunny Side Up” concept felt fully at home in the outdoor ecosystem rather than retrofitted into it.
To assess impact, the campaign included an added-value brand lift study measuring awareness, consideration, intent, recall, and recommendation across key demographic groups.
Together, AllGear Digital and AllTrails orchestrated an integrated campaign that brought Vital Farms’ brand purpose to life across the full consumer journey—from first touch to on-platform engagement to measured brand impact. By blending a compelling creative idea with thoughtful media design, contextual content, and rigorous measurement, “Sunny Side Up” demonstrated how a values-driven narrative can scale across platforms while staying rooted in authentic real-world experiences.
The “Sunny Side Up” campaign exceeded expectations across every major performance indicator, proving the effectiveness of a tightly integrated, values-aligned approach.
Across AGD+ and AllTrails, the campaign delivered 24.4M impressions—an over-delivery of 37% above plan—with high-impact placements and run-of-network media driving sustained visibility among active adults and outdoor enthusiasts. AllTrails newsletter inclusions generated the highest clicks of any tactic, while paid social delivered top-tier efficiency with CTR performance between 1.1–1.3%, led by Instagram dark ads.
Brand impact was strong. An added-value brand lift study showed statistically significant gains across multiple metrics, including:
Key demographics such as higher-income households and midlife outdoor enthusiasts registered the strongest lifts, confirming that the campaign successfully reached and resonated with priority audiences.
Collectively, these results demonstrated the power of blending contextual storytelling, platform-native creative, and strategic media orchestration. “Sunny Side Up” not only elevated Vital Farms’ visibility—it strengthened brand affinity in a way that felt both authentic and measurable.
